Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Toured The Fjord

This post contains spoilers about quests in Howling Fjord. Proceed at your own risk.

Last night I got some solid playtime in and continued my questing through Howling Fjord. I’ve only done about a dozen quests in Borean Tundra on the Hunter so I don’t feel like I can really compare the two zones. Having said that, I will say I really enjoyed Howling Fjord. The quests were excellent and I never had too much trouble with Horde.

From the moment you step off the boat, you are thrown right into the action with the Vyrkyl attacking Valgarde.

The Vyrkyl story is well laid out as you progress from Nifflevar to Baleheim to Skorn and ultimately to Gjalerborn. One of the main story arcs is about the King of the Vyrkyl, King Ymiron. You first meet King Ymiron during one of your trips to the Spirit World, which gives you a glimpse of the Vyrkyl from over 10,000 years ago. Ymiron is ordering the deaths of the mutant and deformed offspring of the Vyrkyl. You later discover these deformed offspring are, in fact, the first humans!

I don’t think the story every quite explained how the Vyrkyl returned, though perhaps those answers lie in Utgarde Pinacle.

In Gjalerborn, you find out the Scourge has had a hand in reanimating the Vyrkyl, but to me that would make them Undead and most of the ones I fought were Humaniod. It turns out King Ymirmon is also being reanimated. Well, I had to put a stop to that. When I did, I got a visit from none other than the Lich King himself. It seems he had other plans for Ymirmon.

I’ll tell both those idiots, we shall meet again!

Also in Gjalerborn, you have to stop a Frost Wyrm from attacking Westguard Keep. The Wyrm is a Level 71 Elite, but despite that, I still managed to solo him fairly easily. Fighting a Frost Wyrm was very cool. Big Bear Butt had asked about stories of people being really cool or really being jerks. I had my first run in with the ‘jerk’ variety last night. I was doing a quest where you had to drop some explosives. A bat would come down and drop guano (the quest item), and then you had to fight the bat. Blizzard has a serious thing for guano, by the way.

Well, this Dwarf Hunter was also doing the quest. But he was feigning death as the Bat dropped. The bat would fly back up to the his spot or aggro to me. He was free to just pick up the quest item. That was pretty creative. What was not cool was he’d wait until the bat I summoned dropped the quest item, and then take mine while I was engaged with the Bat. He walked up to me and said “Your guano, lol”

Ninjaing quest items gets a big ole thumbs down in my book.

If you could attack your own faction, I probably would have. Instead, I just left the area to work on another quest.

I made of note of his name and his guild’s name (love that you can add comments to your friends list). Karma is a funny thing.

Meanwhile, I got a quest at the Steel Gate that asked me to ascend Frostpeak Mountain and deal with my inner turmoil. You climb all the way up the mountain and have to fight your dark inner self that is being drawn and pulled to serve the Lich King. I am a Knight of the Silver Hand. I will never turn to the Dark Side!

What was cool was after you complete the quest, you get a 3 minute Slow Fall buff. So I mounted up the Charger and leapt off the mountain. It looked like my Charger was galloping through the air. Now I want Blizzard to give us a way to allow our Chargers to fly. I think it would rock. I probably flew a third of the way across the zone. This leads you on a quest chain where you become a wolf for a while and help out one of the Worgs in the area. I had a lot of fun on that chain.

The quests at the Dwarf camp were excellent. I enjoyed building my golem suit and then using it to explore the Iron Dwarf cave and my first encounter with Loken. One thing that puzzled me was he talked about the work of the ‘brothers to the north’. Last night, I started to put it together. He was referring to the Iron Dwarves near Fort Wildervar who where creating the Runed Stone Giants! Those Stone Giants are being sent to neutralize the defense of the Pantheon at Ulduar! Who is this ‘father’ they want to release? Perhaps another C’thun type of guy?

I also had my first encounter with a Horde Death Knight last night, and it didn’t go well. I know so little about the class, and I have no experience fighting them in PVP. I was able to burst on him pretty good. I feared his Ghoul, and then he summoned a Gargoyle. I thought I had him dead when he suddenly went Immune, then the Death Knight turned into a Ghoul. By that point I had let myself get too low and he got me. I’m going to need to learn how to fight these guys. I’m not really all that much in PVP, but on a PVP server, you have to know how to fight to survive. Edit: Apparently, the whole turn into a Ghoul thing is something they do AFTER they die. I shall now consider this encounter a Victory in my revisionist history.By the end of the night I had ‘Toured the Fjord’ and explored Howling Fjord.I was about 90% towards 73. I really wanted to press on, but I had already gone about an hour longer than I should have. So tomorrow I should hit 73.

Ok, you ran into an unholy death knight. The key to dealing with unholy death knight as paladin is cleanse. His damage is predicated on the number of diseases he puts on you. If he hits 3, he can pull off some impressive strikes that deals damage based on the number of debuff on you.

As CVJ mentioned, the fact that he has a perminent ghoul and summons gargoyl (both mid range unholy talent) and Turning into Ghoul means that he also specced into that pvp spec of coming back as a ghoul for 3 minutes after death.